Game review - Spoilers regarding final mission

[Voodoomachine]

Overall, I had fun with this game - until the last mission.

The good - it's a fun game if you like X-com style games. Good artwork, Especially on the artificer armors. Definitely has the feel of playing Space Marines. If you know 40k, you'll enjoy the story and the lore. Some interesting upgrade mechanics, between the skill trees, the ship, the strategems, etc.

The Bad - the last mission is awful. It ends up with two parts, and the part with the big boss is NOT the part you spend most of the time on. It also strips you of a lot of the special abilities you've spent all game developing. The Big boss is also basically a shield generator that you have to wack until you can get to the real targets.

I want to fight the big boss, not spend 3/4 of the time fighting his reinforcements. Also, all of the sudden I can't use strategems? I can't use willpower? So basically I spent all game developing these special abilities, both on characters and as the commander, and on the final boss....I don't really get to use them?

That's not good final boss design.

What's even worse is that I never saw the boss even attack. I simply hit him until he stunned, then spent the next twenty minutes fighting reinforcements. Not the boss. Little dude. The same type you fight ALL GAME.

I'm not exaggerating here - I never once saw his attack animation.

That's not even getting into the technical issues - twice I had the game lock up and I had to restart, and I ended up reloading a few times just to clear out the bodies that were slowing down my PC.

Overall, I'm severally disappointed. The game was fun throughout most of it, and then the last mission is like they couldn't figure out an interesting way to end it, so they just strip you of everything fun and make you slog for an hour.

[Etheric]

Well the strategems are due to the inquisitor, who is kinda indisposed. You should be able to use willpower. The boss does have a silence ability maybe that is it?

Honestly I enjoyed it the first time, seemed like a cool mechanic.

[Player]

yeah not enough focus on the big bad in that fight and taking away stuff the player spent the game building up to sucks

[Voodoomachine]

@Etheric - Doesn't really address the fact that you lose out on an ability pool that you spent time and resources developing, does it?

Removing abilities that the player has developed for the final fight - the fight where a player really should be able to show off those abilities - is bad level design.

The boss has both an AoE silence, and another ability that punishes willpower usage - an ability that is map wide and permanent. So basically shutting off the other pool of abilities you spent all game developing. I know why it happened - I'm saying it was a bad design choice.

On the last mission - the last big bad boss - and saying "yeah, no more cool abilities - all you can do is move and basic attack" is a pretty ♥♥♥♥ way to reward the player for leveling up and promoting their knights, getting interesting gear, and developing the strategem system.

They could've made different objectives or enemies which reward having a spread of abilities, could've made challenges that were made more easily solvable by interesting usage of strategems...

Instead, they said "nah, just beat the boss until he unlocks objectives, then attack the objective."

For the final boss of the game, that's hugely disappointing.

Especially since you're not even fighting the boss most of the time - you're fighting reinforcements, which are the same enemies you fought all game.

To be clear - I beat it on the first run. I was just hugely disappointed with the fight.

[Charlando[SunsOfStmChrts]]

How does the last boss it compare to the final battle in XCOM2 against 3 Avatars with reinforcements?

[Koreanpowerman]

Well, the boss fight is pretty much trash design. No warning before that you need 8 marines in the final mission, no stratagems, an endurance fight that bleeds your WP. Horrible suicide mobs with AOE, the only way is to burst him down with stuns.

And most of all, the mission takes forever.

Can`t say that I expected better from the game after playing it that much.
Would be surprised if even 20% of players finish this crap.

[Ulfric Sombrage]

I agree, I love this game but the final fight is a total plague.

There will always be people who will say it's "EaSy EvEn in uLtRa HaRd MoDe" but let's be realistic, 90% of people won't be able to complete it. And even if you beat it,it's just too long and boring as hell. Never say such a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, except in Blackguards 2 (which is well know to have problems with it's difficulty)

[Nox]

Totally disagree. It was meant to be challenging and give you a sense of 'this is a losing fight, the longer it drags on' and I really did. I played on Ruthless, my campaign ran me about 97 hours, by the time I got to the last mission, I got enough warnings that this would be The Mission. I had around 15 knights at level 9, and certainly 8 chads to bring for the final fight. I had a blast. My only complaint is I wish the game was more open ended, so I could keep playing. But I really look forward to more content.

[Ulfric Sombrage]

Yes ok, you are awesome. But challenging doesn't necessary mean hardcore 2 hours fight. This is just too much, especially compared to other bosses I defeated in something like 5 minutes, Munificus excepted.

[Koreanpowerman]

Originally posted by OnZlaught:

Totally disagree. It was meant to be challenging and give you a sense of 'this is a losing fight, the longer it drags on' and I really did. I played on Ruthless, my campaign ran me about 97 hours, by the time I got to the last mission, I got enough warnings that this would be The Mission. I had around 15 knights at level 9, and certainly 8 chads to bring for the final fight. I had a blast. My only complaint is I wish the game was more open ended, so I could keep playing. But I really look forward to more content.

Sorry, it`s no fun to be out of WP after half the fight. And that`s what happened to me the first time I tried it and didn`t yet know that it`s another stun fest (I don`t read guides, sorry).

I get what you mean, but this game does not deliver very well:

Good games with appropriate difficulty don`t give you one hours fights where you have to know the strategy before in order to succeed.

Moreover, why are so many bosses - including Mortarion - stun fests? How can the devs expect any other build to be viable if they need you to crit and stun at every corner?

The defense didn`t even matter in my game. I got frustrated when 10 Chaos Marines stormed the gate , because they were just too many for my team (one lvl7 and one lvl5 in there). But it turned out not to matter, because they didn´t even get a turn inside the gate. So why do I have to waste all that time defending it?

[Imperium]

(Final mission spoilers ahead) They shouldn't have taken away our strategems, the final fight, its actually 5 times harder than the actual game until then, I won this on Ruthless, but it was very annoying, especially how the defense part of the map is designed. You have zero WP left by the time you half way thought the fight.

I get that Inquisitor helped us research the strategems, but once researched I see no reason why we need her to get them to work. Especially considering we dont really need strategems in regular fights, it makes them faster but dont help that much. The one fight we would need them, we are not allowed to use them, after basically spending most of our time researching.

Plus final fight punishes you in all kinds of ways, for example executions dont return AP to Drago, and enemies need nothing but touch the portal to teleport to the map, AI already had a huge range advantage with us not having any sniper or effective long range units, while the mission spawns drones that shoots armor piercing aoe missiles at like 30 range.

[[XIII] Lucius Vinicius]

Aside form losing Stratagems, healing is not available enough for comfort in this mission. Morty and friends deal lots of damage, but Apothecaries can only heal once per turn and maybe 3-4 times per mission. THis game is supposed to be played in a "kill it before it hurts you" kind of way, and Morty's root-HP-gates drag it kicking and screaming out of its intended comfort zone. Add to that, even on "fast" the enemies are pretty slow, we get the same close-ups again and again, and there are a lot of enemies. It just takes too long to be enganging.

[Charlando[SunsOfStmChrts]]

Can morty be silenced? Seems like that would shut down a lot of his really annoying abilities.

[Imperium]

Originally posted by CharlandoSunsOfStmChrts:

Can morty be silenced? Seems like that would shut down a lot of his really annoying abilities.

Morty him self is actually not strong at all, he is unable to hurt you in any significant way, especially considering you will have most of your team on him, breaking off his weapons every turn and lowering his damage.

The "hard" part is probably the defense of the gate portal, where you are overwhelmed from every side, 5? times with your secondary team, if you played like me, you likely wouldnt even have top tier gear to equip all 8 guys... I saw a youtuber play on legendary and by the end of his last defense mission he had like 10+ deathguard make it through the portal and he only won by putting every unit on morty to kill it, realistically if map had you clear all the enemies too he would have 100% lost.

I question if this mission would actually be hard on a second play through when you actually know who to build and bring for final confrontation. With the strategems I think we would have steamrolled morty, especially if enough research was put into them... but it was very weak of devs to just take them away. They should have found better ways to make fight harder.

[Ulfric Sombrage]

What's the trophy for completing the game in normal difficulty ? Just to have stats about this

[Charlando[SunsOfStmChrts]]

Originally posted by Imperium:

I question if this mission would actually be hard on a second play through when you actually know who to build and bring for final confrontation.

Yeah thats the thing with this game, many of these fights seem like they'd be kinda easy if you have just the right kind of composition with the right "gimmicks", but you are almost guaranteed to fail the first time if your squad composition line up perfectly.

I happened to have a purgator with a psilencer the first time I fought kadex but I can imagine it would be way harder If I didn't